Sony boss warns of pirate attacks

Paul Allen Business reporter allenp@jamaicaobserver.com

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Fighting off marauding pirates is one of the main tasks facing the creative industries, Lisa Zbigniew, president of SonyBMG, told a Jamaica Stock Exchange conference last week.

Increasing access to technology and the Internet has made it more important, and difficult, to protect one's copyrights, said the record company boss.

"We're at a critical time in the world of music where we have to be extremely focused on copyrights, the protection of rights and ensuring that the people who are creating are getting paid," Zbigniew said.

Digital piracy began when Napster, a file-sharing site, set sail in 1991, she said, adding that the industry has been slow to adapt.

"The only constant is change," she told the JSE's Regional Investments and Capital Markets Conference at the Pegasus Hotel in New Kingston.

Copyright protects those who create original literary, musical, dramatic, artistic and other works, giving the owners exclusive rights to reproduce the works.

In the 1990s, the music industry saw an enormous sales boost as cassette tapes and vinyl records were replaced by compact discs

But thanks to piracy, the last decade saw American sales alone plummet, falling from US$14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, she said.

While the record industry seems to be dying, music consumption is at an all-time high.

People love music, she said. It isn't practical to equate the record industry to the music industry as 90 per cent of people chose to secure their music in unauthorised ways.

"We have to figure out how to make money from it", she said, noting that it has become easier with increased licensed digital music providers worldwide and the crackdown on major piracy sites, including Limewire last year and Megaupload this month.

Efforts at curbing digital piracy of American intellectual property were halted last week when two bills, Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property, were defeated in the US.

Traditional media lobbied to have them passed to protect their interests but new media, including Wikipedia and Google, altered their sites in protest. Social networks led the charge as Twitter was used to encourage thousands to join protests launched against the bills.

Critics argued that the laws could have been used to censor and force out of business legitimate sites as well as the priates.

Further action for the bills have been postponed as its main supporter, Republican Lamar Smith, said he has heard the criticisms and admits that a new approach to piracy will have to be found.